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<©ID ^>out{) Eeafletg. 

No. 175. 


Longfellow 

Memorial. 


Prom the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical 
Society, April 13, 1882. 

The Vice-President, Dr. George E. Ellis, announced the death 
of Mr. Longfellow, as follows:— 

Much to our regret we miss our honored President from his 
chair to-day, on this the ninety-first annual meeting of the Society. 
It is gratifying to be assured that he has safely reached the other 
side of the ocean, and may be looked for with us again early in 
the autumn. It will be remembered that in opening the last 
meeting he expressed for us all the relief which he found in not 
being called upon, as in such rapid and melancholy succession 
he had been at so many previous meetings, to announce a loss 
from our limited roll of associates. But again must there be 
stricken from it the name of one who leaves upon the list no 
other so enshrined in the affection, the grateful homage, we may 
even say the venerating regard, of the world-wide fellowship 
of civilized humanity. 

On the announcement to our deeply moved community of 
the death of Mr. Longfellow, though I had taken leave of Mr. 
Winthrop near the eve of his departure, I wrote to him asking 
that he would commit to me, to be read here and now, what 
he would himself have said if he were to be with us to-day. In 
his brief note of reply he writes: “How gladly would I comply 
with your suggestion, and send you, for the next meeting of our 
Society, some little tribute to our lamented Longfellow! But, 
at this last hurried moment before leaving home, I could do 
justice neither to him nor to myself. I was just going out to 

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bid him good-by, when his serious illness was announced, and 
in a day or two more all was over. The last time he was in 
Europe I was there with him, and I was a witness to not a few 
of the honors which he received from high and low. 
I remember particularly that when we were coming away 
from the House of Lords together, where we had been hearing 
a fine speech from his friend the Duke of Argyll, a group 
of the common people gathered around our carriage, calling 
him by name, begging to touch his hand, and at least one 
of them reciting aloud one of his most familiar poems. 
No poet of our day has touched the common heart like 
Longfellow. The simplicity and purity of his style were a 
part of his own character. He had nothing of that irritability 
which is one of the proverbial elements of the poetic tem¬ 
perament, but was always genial, generous, lovely.” I will 
not attempt to add anything, as tribute, to that heart utter¬ 
ance from our President. Indeed, it would be difficult to find 
variations in the terms of language even, much more in the senti¬ 
ments to be expressed by them, in tributes of tender and appreci¬ 
ative regard and affection for Mr. Longfellow. Full and profound 
in depth and earnestness have been the honors to him in speech 
and print; richer still, because unutterable, and only for the 
privacy of those who cherish them, are the responsive silences 
of the heart. 

It is fitting, however, that we put on record our recognition 
of Mr. Longfellow in his relations to this Society. He accepted 
the membership to which he had been elected in December, 
1857. Those who were associates in it twenty-five years ago 
will recall two signal occasions delightfully associated with his 
presence and speech. The one was a special meeting, to which 
he invited the Society at his own residence, as Washington’s 
headquarters, in Cambridge, on June 17, 1858. There was much 
of charming and instructive interest in the scenes and associations 
of the occasion, added to the communications made by several 
members full of historic information freshly related from original 
sources. The host himself was silent, save as by his genial 
greeting and warm hospitality he welcomed his grateful guests. 
The other marked occasion was also at a special meeting of the 
Society, held in December, 1859, at the house of our associate, 
Mr. Sears. The meeting was devoted to tributes of respect and 
affection for Washington Irving, from many who had shared 
his most intimate friendship. Mr. Longfellow gave hearty 
454 

• Gift 

Thp SoeiotN 




3 


and delicate expression to his regard for Irving, while Everett, 
Felton, Colonel Aspinwali, G. Sumner, and Dr. Holmes con¬ 
tributed their offerings to the memory of that admired author. 
But few of our associates, in its nearly a century of years, can 
have studied our local and even national history more sedulously 
than did Mr. Longfellow. And but fewer still among us can 
have found in its stern and rugged and homely actors and annals 
so much that could be graced and softened by rich and delicate 
fancies, by refining sentiments, and the hues and fragrance of 
simple poetry. He took the saddest of our New England tragedies 
and the sweetest of its rural home scenes, the wayside inn, the 
alarum of war, the Indian legend, and the hanging of the crane 
in the modest household, and his genius has invested them with 
enduring charms and morals. Wise and gentle was the heart 
which could thus find melodies for the harp, the lyre, and the 
plectrum in our fields and wildernesses, wreathing them as nature 
does the thickets and stumps of the forest with flowers and mosses. 
While all his utterances came from a pure, a tender, and a devout 
heart, addressing themselves to what is of like in other hearts, 
there is not in them a line of morbidness, of depression, or melan¬ 
choly, but only that which quickens and cheers with robust 
resolve and courage, with peace and aspiring trust. He has, 
indeed, used freely the poet’s license in playful freedom with 
dates and facts. But the scenes and incidents and personages 
which most need a softening and refining touch receive it from 
him without prejudice to the service of sober history. 

Dr. Ellis closed his remarks by offering the following Reso¬ 
lution:— 

Resolved , That, in yielding from our roll the name of Henry 
Wadsworth Longfellow, we would put on our records the ex¬ 
pression of our profoundest regard, esteem, and admiring apprecia¬ 
tion of his character and genius, and our grateful sense of the 
honor and satisfaction we have shared in his companionship. 

The Resolution was seconded by Dr. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, who addressed the Society with much feeling, as fol¬ 
lows:— 

It is with no vain lamentations, but rather with profound 
gratitude that we follow the soul of our much-loved and long¬ 
loved poet beyond the confines of the world he helped so largely 

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to make beautiful. We could have wished to keep him longer, 
but at least we were spared witnessing the inevitable shadows 
of an old age protracted too far beyond its natural limits. From 
the first notes of his fluent and harmonious song to the last, which 
comes to us as the “ voice fell like a falling star,” there, has never 
been a discord. The music of the mountain stream, in the poem 
which reaches us from the other shore of being, is as clear and 
sweet as the melodies of the youthful and middle periods of his 
minstrelsy. It has been a fully rounded life, beginning early 
with large promise, equalling every anticipation in its maturity, 
fertile and beautiful to its close in the ripeness of its w 7 ell-filled 
years. 

Until the silence fell upon us we did not entirely appreciate 
how largely his voice was repeated in the echoes of our own 
hearts. The affluence of his production so accustomed us to 
look for a poem from him at short intervals that we could hardly 
feel how precious that was which was so abundant. Not, of 
course, that every single poem reached the standard of the highest 
among them all. That could not be in Homer’s time, and mortals 
must occasionally nod now as then. But the hand of the artist 
shows itself unmistakably in everything which left his desk. 
The O of Giotto could not help being a perfect round, and the 
verse of Longfellow is always perfect in construction. 

He worked in that simple and natural way which character¬ 
izes the master. But it is one thing to be simple through poverty 
of intellect, and another thing to be simple by repression of all 
redundancy and overstatement; one thing to be natural through 
ignorance of all rules, and another to have made a second nature 
out of the sovereign rules of art. In respect of this simplicity 
and naturalness, his style is in strong contrast to that of many 
writers of our time. There is no straining for effect, there is 
no torturing of rhythm for novel patterns, no wearisome iteration 
of petted words, no inelegant clipping of syllables to meet the 
exigencies of a verse; no affected archaism, rarely any liberty 
taken with language, unless it may be in the form of a few w r ords 
in the translation of Dante. I will not except from these remarks 
the singular and original form which he gave to his poem of 
“Hiawatha,”—a poem with a curious history in many respects. 
Suddenly and immensely popular in this country, greatly ad¬ 
mired by many foreign critics, imitated with perfect ease by any 
clever school-boy, serving as a model for metrical advertisements, 
made fun of, sneered at, abused, admired, but, at any rate, a 
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picture full of pleasing fancies and melodious cadences. The 
very names are jewels which the most fastidious muse might 
be proud to wear. Coming from the realm of the Androscoggin 
and of Moosetukmaguntuk, how could he have found two such 
delicious names as Hiawatha and Minnehaha? The eight- 
syllable trochaic verse of “Hiawatha,” like the eight-syllable 
iambic verse of “The Lady of the Lake,” and others of Scott’s 
poems, has a fatal facility, which I have elsewhere endeavored 
to explain on physiological principles. The recital of each 
line uses up the air' of one natural expiration, so that we read, 
as we naturally do, eighteen or twenty lines in a minute, without 
disturbing the normal rhythm of breathing, which is also eighteen 
or twenty breaths to the minute. The standing objection to 
this is that it makes the octo-syllabic verse too easy writing and 
too slipshod reading. Yet in this most frequently criticised 
composition the poet has shown a subtle sense of the require¬ 
ments of his simple story of a primitive race, in choosing the 
most fluid of measures, that lets the thought run through it in easy 
sing-song, such as oral tradition would be sure to find on the 
lips of the story-tellers of the wigwam. Although Longfellow 
was not fond of metrical contortions and acrobatic achievements, 
he well knew the effects of skilful variation in the forms of verse 
and well-managed refrains or repetitions. In one of his very 
earliest poems,—“Pleasant it was when Woods were Green,”—* 
the dropping a syllable from the last line is an agreeable surprise 
to the ear, expecting only the common monotony of scrupu¬ 
lously balanced lines. In “Excelsior” the repetition of the 
aspiring exclamation which gives its name to the poem lifts 
every stanza a step higher than the one which preceded it. In 
the “Old Clock on the Stair,” the solemn words, “Forever, never, 
never, forever,” give wonderful effectiveness to that most im¬ 
pressive poem. 

All his art, all his learning, all his melody, - cannot account 
for his extraordinary popularity, not only among his own country¬ 
men and those who in other lands speak the language in which he 
wrote, but in foreign realms, where he could only be read through 
the ground glass of a translation. It was in his choice of subjects 
that one source of the public favor with which his writings, more 
especially his poems, were received, obviously lay. A poem, 
to be widely popular, must deal with thoughts and emotions that 
belong to common, not exceptional character, conditions, in¬ 
terests. The most popular of all books are those which meet 

457 


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the spiritual needs of mankind most powerfully, such works as 
“The Imitation of Christ” and “Pilgrim’s Progress.” I suppose 
if the great multitude of readers were to render a decision as to 
which of Longfellow’s poems they most valued, the “Psalm of 
Life” would command the largest number. This is a brief 
homily enforcing the great truths of duty, and of our relation to the 
unseen world. Next in order would very probably come “ Excel¬ 
sior,” a poem that springs upward like a flame and carries the 
soul up with it in its aspiration for the unattainable ideal. If 
this sounds like a trumpet-call to the fiery energies of youth, 
not less does the still small voice of that most sweet and tender 
poem, “Resignation,” appeal to the sensibilities of those who 
have lived long enough to have known the bitterness of such a 
bereavement as that out of which grew the poem. Or take a 
poem before referred to, “The Old Clock on the Stair,” and 
in it we find the history of innumerable households told in relating 
the history of one, and the solemn burden of the song repeats 
itself to thousands of listening readers, as if the beat of the pendu¬ 
lum were throbbing at the head of every staircase. Such poems 
as these—and there are many more of not unlike character 1 — 
are the foundation of that universal acceptance his writings 
obtain among all classes. But for these appeals to universal 
sentiment, his readers would have been confined to a compara¬ 
tively small circle of educated and refined readers. There are 
thousands and tens of thousands who are familiar with what 
we might call his household poems who have never read “The 
Spanish Student,” “The Golden Legend,” “Hiawatha,” or 
even “Evangeline.” Again, ask the first school-boy you meet 
which of Longfellow’s poems he likes best, and he will be very 
likely to answer, “Paul Revere’s Ride.” When he is a few years 
older, he might perhaps say, “The Building of the Ship,” that 
admirably constructed poem, beginning with the literal descrip¬ 
tion, passing into the higher region of sentiment by the most 
natural of transitions, and ending with the noble climax,— 

“Thou, too, sail on, O ship of state,” 

which has become the classical expression of patriotic emotion. 

Nothing lasts like a coin and a lyric. Long after the dwell¬ 
ings of men have disappeared, when their temples are in ruins 
and all their works of art are shattered, the ploughman strikes 
an earthen vessel holding the. golden and silver disks, on which 
the features of a dead monarch, with emblems, it may be, be- 
45 8 


7 


traying the beliefs or the manners, the rudeness or the finish 
of art and all which this implies, survive an extinct civilization. 
Pope has expressed this with his usual Horatian felicity, in the 
letter to Addison, on the publication of his little “Treatise on 
Coins,”— 

“A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled, 

And little eagles wave their wings in gold.” 

Conquerors and conquered sink in common oblivion; triumphal 
arches, pageants the world wonders at, all that trumpeted itself 
as destined to an earthly immortality, pass away; the victor 
of a hundred battles is dust; the parchments or papyrus on which 
his deeds were written are shrivelled and decayed and gone,— 

“And all his triumphs shrink into a coin.” 

So it is with a lyric poem. One happy utterance of some 
emotion or expression, which comes home to all, may keep a 
name remembered when the race to which the singer belonged 
is lost sight of. The cradle-song of Danae to her infant as they 
tossed on the waves in the imprisoning chest has made the name 
of Simonides immortal. Our own English literature abounds 
with instances which illustrate the same fact so far as the ex¬ 
perience of a few generations extends. And I think we may 
venture to say that some of the shorter poems of Longfellow 
must surely reach a remote posterity, and be considered then, 
as now, ornaments to English literature. We may compare 
them with the best short poems of the language without fearing 
that they will suffer. Scott, cheerful, wholesome, unreflective, 
should be read in the open air; Byron, the poet of malcontents 
and cynics, in a prison cell; Burns, generous, impassioned, manly, 
social, in the tavern hall; Moore, elegant, fastidious, full of 
melody, scented with the volatile perfume of the Eastern gardens, 
in which his fancy revelled, is pre-eminently the poet of the 
drawing-room and the piano; Longfellow, thoughtful, musical, 
home-loving, busy with the lessons of life, which he was ever 
studying, and loved to teach others, finds his charmed circle 
of listeners by the fireside. His songs, which we might almost 
call sacred ones, rarely if ever get into the hymn-books. They 
are too broadly human to suit the specialized tastes of the sects, 
which often think more of their differences from each other than 
of the common ground on which they can agree. Shall we think 
less of our poet because he so frequently aimed in his verse not 

459 


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simply to please, but also to impress some elevating thought on the 
minds of his readers? The Psalms of King David are burning 
with religious devotion and full of weighty counsel, • but they 
are not less valued, certainly, than the poems of Omar Khayam, 
which cannot be accused of too great a tendency to find a useful 
lesson in their* subject. Dennis, the famous critic, found fault 
with “The Rape of the Lock,” because it had no moral. It is 
not necessary that a poem should carry a moral, any more than 
that a picture of a Madonna should always be an altar-piece. 
The poet himself is the best judge of that in each particular case. 
In that charming little poem of Wordsworth’s, ending, 

“And then my heart with rapture thrills 
And dances with the daffodils,” 

we do not ask for anything more than the record of the impression 
which is told so simply, and which justifies itself by the way 
in which it is told. But who does not feel with the poet that the 
touching story, “Hartleap Well,” must have its lesson brought 
out distinctly, to give a fitting close to the narrative? Who 
would omit those two lines ?— 

“ Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 
With sorrow of the meanest thing that lives.” 

No poet knew better than Longfellow how to impress a moral 
without seeming to preach. Didactic verse, as such, is, no 
doubt, a formidable visitation, but a cathedral has its lesson to 
teach as well as a school-house. These beautiful medallions 
of verse which Longfellow has left us might possibly be found 
fault with as conveying too much useful and elevating truth in 
their legends; having the unartistic aim of being serviceable 
as well as delighting by their beauty. Let us leave such comment 
to the critics who cannot handle a golden coin, fresh from the 
royal mint, without clipping its edges and stamping their own 
initials on its face. 

Of the longer poems of our chief singer, I should not hesi¬ 
tate to select “Evangeline” as the masterpiece, and I think the 
general verdict of opinion would confirm my choice. The Ger¬ 
man model which it follows in its measure and the character 
of its story was itself suggested by an earlier idyl. If Dorothea 
was the mother of Evangeline, Luise was the mother of Dorothea. 
And what a beautiful creation is the Acadian maiden! From 
the first line of the poem, from its first words, we read as we would 
460 


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float down a broad and placid river, murmuring softly against 
its banks, heaven over it, and the glory of the unspoiled wilder¬ 
ness all around,— 

“This is the forest primeval.” 


The words are already as familiar as 


or 


“ M fjviv aside , Osa, 
“Arma virumque cano.” 


The hexameter has been often criticised, but I do not believe 
any other measure could have told that lovely story with such 
effect, as we feel when carried along the tranquil current of these 
brimming, slow-moving, soul-satisfying lines. Imagine for one 
moment a story like this minced into octo-syllabics. The poet 
knows better than his critics the length of step which best befits 
his muse. 

I will not take up your time with any further remarks upon 
writings so well known to all. By the poem I have last men¬ 
tioned, and by his lyrics, or shorter poems, I think the name 
of Longfellow will be longest remembered. Whatever he wrote, 
whether in prose or poetry, bore always the marks of the finest 
scholarship, the purest taste, fertile imagination, a sense of the 
music of words, and a skill in bringing it out of our English 
tongue, which hardly more than one of his contemporaries who 
write in that language can be said to equal. 

The saying of Buffon, that the style is the man himself, or 
of the man himself, as some versions have it, was never truer than 
in the case of our beloved poet. Let us understand by style 
all that gives individuality to the expression of a writer; and in 
the subjects, the handling, the spirit and aim of his poems, we 
see the reflex of a personal character which made him worthy 
of that almost unparalleled homage which crowned his noble 
life. Such a funeral procession as attended him in thought to 
his resting-place has never joined the train of mourners that 
followed the hearse of a poet,— could we not say of any private 
citizen? And we all feel that no tribute could be too generous, 
too universal, to the union of a divine gift with one of the loveliest 
of human characters. 


Dr. Holmes was followed by Professor Charles E. Norton, who 
said:— 

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I could wish that this were a silent meeting. There is no 
need of formal commemorative speech to-day, for all the people 
of the land, the whole English-speaking race,—and not they 
alone,—mourn our friend and poet. Never was poet so mourned, 
for never was poet so beloved. 

There is nothing of lamentation in our mourning. He has 
not been untimely taken. His life was “prolonged with many 
years, happy and famous.” Death came to him in good season, 
or ever the golden bowl was broken, or the pitcher broken at 
the cistern. Desire had but lately failed. Life was fair to him 
almost to its end. On his seventy-fourth birthday, a little more 
than a year ago, with his family and a few friends round his 
dinner table, he said, “There seems to me a mistake in the order 
of the years: I can hardly believe that the four should not precede 
the seven.” But in the year that followed he experienced the 
pains and languor and weariness of age. There was no com¬ 
plaint—the sweetness of his nature was invincible. 

On one of the last times that I saw him, as.I entered his familiar 
study on a beautiful afternoon of this past winter, I said to him, 
“ I hope this is a good day for you ? ” He replied, with a pleasant 
smile, “Ah! there are no good days now.” Happily the evil 
days were not to be many. 

The accord between the character and life of Mr. Longfellow 
and his poems was complete. His poetry touched the hearts of 
his readers because it was the sincere expression of his own. 
The sweetness, the gentleness, the grace; the purity of his verse 
were the image of his own soul. But, beautiful and ample as this 
expression of himself was, it fell short of the truth. The man 
was more and better than the poet. 

Intimate, however, as was the concord between the poet and 
his poetry, there was much in him to which he never gave utterance 
in words. He was a man of deep reserves. He kept the holy 
of holies within himself inviolable and secluded. Seldom does 
he admit his readers even to its outward precincts. The deepest 
experiences of life are not to be shared with any one whatsoever. 
“There are things of which I may not speak,” he says in one of 
the most personal of his poems. 

“Whose hand shall dare to open and explore 
Those volumes closed and clasped forevermore ? 

Not mine. With reverential feet I pass.” 


462 


It was the felicity of Mr. Longfellow to share the sentiment and 
emotion of his coevals, and to succeed in giving to them their 
apt poetic expression. It was not by depth of thought or by 
original views of nature that he won his place in the world’s regard; 
but it was by sympathy with the feelings common to good men 
and women everywhere, and by the simple, direct, sincere, and 
delicate expression of them, that he gained the affection of man¬ 
kind. 

He was fortunate in the time of his birth. He grew up in 
the morning of our republic. He shared in the cheerfulness of 
the early hour, in its hopefulness, its confidence. The years 
of his youth and early manhood coincided with an exceptional 
moment of national life, in which a prosperous and unembarrassed 
democracy was learning its own capacities, and was beginning 
to realize its large and novel resources; in which the order of 
society was still simple and humane. He became, more than 
any one else, the voice of this epoch of national progress, an 
epoch of unexampled prosperity for the masses of mankind in our 
new world, prosperity from which sprang a sense, more general 
and deeper than had ever before been felt, of human kindness 
and brotherhood. But, even to the prosperous, life brings its in¬ 
evitable burden. Trial, sorrow, misfortune, are not to be es¬ 
caped by the happiest of men. The deepest experiences of 
each individual are the experiences common to the whole race. 
And it is this double aspect of American life—its novel and happy* 
conditions, with the genial spirit resulting from them, and, at 
the same time, its subjection to the old, absolute, universal laws 
of existence—that finds its mirror and manifestation in Long¬ 
fellow’s poetry. 

No one can read his poetry without a conviction of the sim¬ 
plicity, tenderness, and humanity of the poet. And we who 
were his friends know how these qualities shone in his daily 
conversation. Praise, applause, flattery,—and no man ever 
was exposed to more of them,—never touched him to harm 
him. He walked through their flames unscathed, as Dante 
through the fires of purgatory. His modesty was perfect. He 
accepted the praise as he would have accepted any other pleasant 
gift,—glad of it as an expression of good will, but without per¬ 
sonal elation. Indeed, he had too much of it, and often in an 
absurd form, not to become at times weary of what his own fame 
and virtues brought upon him. But his kindliness did not per¬ 
mit him to show his weariness to those who did but burden him 

463 


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with their admiration. It was the penalty of his genius, and he 
accepted it with the pleasantest temper and a humorous resigna¬ 
tion. Bores of all nations, especially of our own, persecuted 
him. His long-suffering patience was a wonder to his friends. 
It was, in truth, the sweetest charity. No man was ever before 
so kind to those moral mendicants. One day I ventured to 
remonstrate with him on his endurance of the persecutions of one 
of the worst of the class, who to lack of modesty added lack of 
honesty,—a wretched creature,—and, when I had done, he looked 
at me with an amused expression, and half deprecatingly replied, 
“But, Charles, who would be kind to him if I were not?” It 
was enough. He was helped by a gift of humor, which, though 
seldom displayed in his poems, lighted up his talk and added a 
charm to his intercourse. He was the most gracious of men in 
his own home; he was fond of the society of his friends, and 
the company that gathered in his study or round his table took 
its tone from his own genial, liberal, cultivated, and refined 
nature. 

“With loving breath of all the winds his name 
Is blown about the world; but to his friends 
A sweeter secret hides behind his fame, 

And love steals shyly through the loud acclaim 
To murmur a God bless you! and there ends.” 

His verse, his fame, are henceforth the precious possessions 
of the people whom he loved so well. They will be among the 
effective instruments in shaping the future character of the nation. 
His spirit will continue to soften, to refine, to elevate the hearts 
of men. He will be the beloved friend of future generations as 
he has been of his own. His desire will be gratified:— 

“And in your life let my remembrance linger, 

As something not to trouble and disturb it, 

But to complete it, adding life to life. 

And if at times beside the evening fire 
You see my face among the other faces, 

Let it not be regarded as a ghost 

That haunts your house, but as a guest that loves you, 

Nay, even as one of your own family, 

Without whose presence there were something wanting. 

I have no more to say.” 

Mr. William Everett spoke with much force of the pre¬ 
eminent gifts of Mr. Longfellow, and, although not given to 
comparisons, he could not help putting his “Ship of State” 
464 


3 


alongside of Horace’s passionate burst of song beginning “O 
navis!” After reciting the two, Mr. Everett declared that our 
singer had encountered the greatest lyric poet of Rome on his 
own ground, and, grappling with him, had fairly thrown him. 

The Resolution was unanimously adopted by a standing vote. 


From the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical 
Society, Feb. 14, 1907. 

This meeting of the Historical Society, coming in the month 
of the centenary of the birth of Longfellow, was also made in a 
measure a memorial meeting, with appropriate remarks by the 
President, Charles Francis Adams, by T. W. Higginson, Charles 
Eliot Norton, William R. Thayer, Bliss Perry, William W. Good¬ 
win, Samuel A. Green, and Franklin B. Sanborn. Mr. Thayer 
spoke as follows upon Longfellow as our national poet:— 

Every year that passes makes it more evident that Longfellow has 
come to be the American national poet in much the same sense that 
Burns is the Scotch national poet. We have drawn far enough away 
from him and his contemporaries to be able to see clearly that he pos¬ 
sesses the national quality to a degree to which none of the others at¬ 
tained. Bryant, Whittier, Emerson, and Lowell had patriotism and 
the moral outlook in common with him; Bryant and Lowell, like Long¬ 
fellow, dipped occasionally into European sources; Whittier, like 
Longfellow, immortalized some of our local or national events; all 
loved Nature, all observed her accurately and described her sympatheti¬ 
cally,—Nature as she reveals herself to a New Englander. But, if you 
compare their work with his, you will perceive that Longfellow has a 
representative character which they lack, and a certain something 
which recommends him to a larger variety of tastes than they can 
satisfy. 

Numbers predicate nothing, of course, as to merit. So the charge 
used to be made, and one hears it still, that Longfellow owed his im¬ 
mense popularity to his commonplaceness. But the true deduction to 
be made from his popularity leads in the other direction. Longfellow 
is popular, not because of his commonplaceness r but because of his art, 
which has raised millions of his readers above the commonplace. The 
same domestic sentiment, the same moral precept, the same patriotic 
desire, had been expressed, it may be, many times: he expressed it in 
the way peculiar to him—the way which added beauty or charm—and 
it became idealized to them, and his poetic description of it passed cur¬ 
rent as a household word. That is what I mean in calling him so much 
more widely representative than, let us say, Lowell or Whittier. Sixty 
thousand copies of “Evangeline” are reported to have been sold within 

465 


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two months of its publication. Shall we argue from that a triumph 
of the commonplace, a riot of Philistinism? Far from it: those figures 
prove the genius of the poet who by his art—delicate and sincere art, 
sweet art, if ever there were such—could commend a poem of that ex¬ 
cellence to so large a multitude of strangers. In other words, a potential 
appreciation of poetry is latent in a much wider circle than we com¬ 
monly suppose. Longfellow struck a responsive chord in myriads who 
were dumb to other singers: that was because of his magic gift, not of 
his commonplaceness. 

Numbers, let us repeat, give no hint as to excellence; and yet, when 
multitudes love a certain poet and keep on loving him after the bloom 
of novelty has worn off, the fact of numbers may mean a great deal. 
It may mean, for instance, that he has universality; that is, that he can 
describe some of the primal human concerns in such fashion that every 
one recognizes him as a true spokesman. Now this is exactly what 
Longfellow did: he uttered our American ideals in poetry which had a 
national flavor. Nothing could be more genuinely Yankee than Lowell’s 
“Biglow Papers,” nothing more unalloyedly Puritan than many of 
Whittier’s poems, and yet the poetry of Lowell and Whittier is too 
strongly individualized, too obviously limited by the personal idiosyn¬ 
crasy of each, ever to be national as Longfellow’s poetry is national. 

Longfellow sang not only the ideals of the Settlers and the Founders— 
Liberty, Independence, Union, and Democracy were still the national 
watchwords when he began to write, although Union was soon to be 
tested in the fiery furnace—but to them were being added others, not so 
much civic and political as social and individual. Our long isolation, 
which had permitted us to become Yankees instead of Englishmen and 
to be free instead of subjects of the British Crown, was being broken 
up. Immigration on a large scale had begun, and it was slowly to 
change the nature of our racial stock. The American, ceasing to be 
nine-tenths Anglo-Saxon, was becoming truly cosmopolitan. Hence¬ 
forth Latin and Teuton, Scandinavian and Slav, must contribute their 
ingredients to the composite American character. Now Longfellow, 
beyond all other Americans, knew the spirit of those peoples through 
their literatures, and by translating many of their poems and by re¬ 
telling many of their favorite stories he prepared the way for some sort 
of sympathetic meeting when the strangers began to pour into the United 
States. The service which he rendered to our culture by infusing into 
it strains from the Continental reservoirs has been freely acknowledged, 
but his even greater service as spokesman of the New American has 
been almost overlooked. That New American is by inheritance a cos¬ 
mopolite; it required a poet of cosmopolitan culture and sympathy to 
be his spokesman. Here, again, Longfellow displays the trait of uni¬ 
versality which makes him of all our poets the most accessible to our 
oldest and youngest citizens alike. We may well be grateful that our 
new populations can through him come to know our ideals of duty, 
service, dignity, courage, self sacrifice, kindliness, friendship, affection, 
466 


15 


and patriotism; for it is, after all, on these primary virtues and affec¬ 
tions that the character of man and nation must be built. This also 
stamps him as our national poet. . . „ 

Who shall compute the great gifts he brought us? He put into the 
finest ballads produced in America some typical episodes. He wrote 
not only the best sonnets ever written in America, but sonnets which are 
among the best in English. He made the best metrical translation of 
“The Divine Comedy.” He wrote the epic of the Indian, which, 
though it may too much idealize its subject, will remain unapproached, 
for the time is past when that theme is likely to commend itself to a great 
poet. He embalmed in verse the life of the first settlers, the fortunes 
of the men of Plymouth, the tranquil joys and tragic end of the French 
at Acadie. He immortalized many a spot by pouring upon it the elixir 
of poetry. He commemorated friends whose lives have become a part 
of our history. He embodied the national ideals of the Settlers and of 
the Founders—those ideals which made us Yankees; he embodied also 
the ideals which are making the new generations cosmopolites—Ameri¬ 
cans in whom blend the traits of many races. Happy are we in such 
a national poet! 

Mr. Adams, after paying high tribute to Longfellow as a poet,— 
“to my mind,” he said, “ it is doubtful whether any other Ameri¬ 
can writer has contributed to the innocent intellectual enjoyment 
of so many people in a degree at all comparable,”—proceeded to 
point out certain inaccuracies as to historic fact in “ The Courtship 
of Miles Standish,” “The Rhyme of Sir Christopher,” and “Paul 
Revere’s Ride.” Touching the first, he repeated the following 
passage from an address which he gave before the Weymouth 
Historical Society a few years before, in which he had first quoted 
from the poem Longfellow’s account of Miles Standish’s march 
and conflict with the Indians at Wessagusset: — 

We all recognize in these cases what is known as “poetic license.” 
It is the unquestioned privilege of the poet to so mould hard facts and 
actual conditions as to make realities conform to his idea of the ever¬ 
lasting fitness of things. On the other hand, it is but fair that, in so 
doing, the artist should improve on the facts. In other words, he 
should at least not make them more prosaic, and distinctly less dra¬ 
matic, than they were. In the present case, I submit, Longfellow, 
instead of rendering things more poetic and dramatic, made them 
distinctly less so. This I shall now proceed to show. 

And here let me premise that it was the habit of Longfellow, as 
I think the unfortunate habit, to improvise—so to speak, to evolve 
from his inner consciousness—the local atmosphere and conditions 
of those poems of his in which he dealt with history and historical 
happenings. It was so with “Paul Revere’s Ride”; it was so with 

467 


1 6 


the episodes made use of in the “Tales of a Wayside Inn”; it is noto¬ 
rious it was so in the case of “Evangeline” and Acadia; it was 
strikingly, and far more inexcusably, so in the case of “Miles Standish” 
and Plymouth. While preparing a poem which has deservedly become 
an American classic, as such throwing a glamour of romance over that 
entire region to which it has given the name of the “Evangeline Coun¬ 
try,” Longfellow never sought to draw inspiration from actual contact 
with that “forest primeval” of which he sang; nor again, when dealing 
with the events of our own early history, did he once visit, much less 
study, the scene of that which he pictured. He imagined everything. 
I gravely question whether he even knew that the conflict he describes 
in the lines I have just quoted took place on the shores of Boston bay 
and at a point not twenty miles from the historic mansion in which he 
lived and the library where he imagined. He certainly, and more’s 
the pity, never stood on King-oak Hill or sailed up the Fore River. 

What actually occurred here in April, 1623, I have endeavored else¬ 
where to describe in detail, just as it appears in our early records. 
Those curious on the subject will find my narrative in a chapter (vi.) 
entitled “The Smoking Flax Blood-Quenched,” in a work of mine, the 
matured outcome of my address here in 1874, called “Three Episodes 
of Massachusetts History.” To that I refer them. Meanwhile, suffice 
it for me now to say, the actual occurrences of those early April days 
were stronger, more virile, and infinitely more dramatic and better 
adapted to poetic treatment,—in one word, more Homeric,—than 
the wholly apocryphal and somewhat mawkish cast given them in the 
lines I have quoted. Indeed, so far as the incidents drawn from the 
history of Weymouth are concerned, the whole is, in the original rec¬ 
ords, replete with vigorous life. It smacks of the savage; it is racy 
of the soil; it smells of the sea. It begins with the flight of Phineas 
Pratt from Wessagusset to Plymouth, his loss of the way, his fear lest 
his footprints in the late-lingering snow-banks should betray him, his 
nights in the woods, his pursuit by the Indians, his guidance by the 
stars and sky, his fording the icy river, and his arrival in Plymouth just 
as Miles Standish was embarking for Wessagusset. Nothing, then, can 
be more picturesque, more epic in outline, than Standish’s voyage, 
with his little company of grim, silent men in that open boat. Sternly 
bent on action, they skirted, under a gloomy eastern sky, along the surf- 
beaten shore, the mist driving in their faces as the swelling seas broke 
roughly in white surge over the rocks and ledges which still obstruct 
the course they took. From the distance came the dull, monotonous 
roar of the breakers, ^indicating the line of the coast. At last they cast 
anchor before the desolate and apparently deserted block-house here in 
your Fore-river, and presently some woe-begone stragglers answered 
their call. Next came the meeting with the savages, the fencing talk, 
and the episode of what Holmes, in still another poem, refers to as 
“Wituwamet’s pictured knife 
And Pecksuot’s whooping shout”; 

468 


17 


all closing with the fierce hand-to-hand death grapple on the blood- 
soaked, slippery floor of the rude stockade. Last of all the return to 
Plymouth, with the gory head of Wattawamat, “that bloody and bold 
villain,” a ghastly freight, stowed in the rummage of their boat. 

The whole story is, in the originals, full of life, simplicity and vigor, 
needing only to be turned into verse. But, in place of the voyage, we 
have in Longfellow’s poem a march through the woods, which, having 
never taken place, has in it nothing characteristic; an interview before 
an Indian encampment “pitched on the edge of a meadow, between 
the sea and the forest,” at which the knife scene is enacted, instead 
of in the rude block-house; and, finally, the killing takes place amid a 
discharge of firearms, and “there on the flowers of the meadow the 
warriors” are made to lie; whereas in fact they died far more vigorously, 
as well as poetically, on the bloody floor of the log house in which they 
were surprised, “not making any fearful noise, but catching at their 
weapons and striving to the last.” And as for “flowers,” it was early in 
April, and, in spots, the snow still lingered! That Longfellow wrote 
very sweet verse, none will deny; but, assuredly, he was not Homeric. 
At his hands your Weymouth history failed to have justice done it. 


The subject chosen for the Old South lectures for young people for 1907, 
the centennial of the births of Longfellow and Whittier, was “Boston History 
in the Boston Poets.” Earlier in the year the service of Longfellow and 
Whittier for American history and life was made the theme of the annual 
course of Old South lectures for the Boston teachers. The use by all of our 
greater poets of subjects relating to our national history was very large. 
When we think, in Longfellow’s case, of “The Song of Hiawatha,” “The 
Courtship of Miles Standish,” the “New England Tragedies,” “Evangeline,” 
so much in the'“ Wayside Inn,” and the score of shorter works on similar 
themes, we see that nearly half of the total body of his poetry is of this char¬ 
acter. Similarly we might refer to the poetry in the field of American history 
by Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, and Emerson, as well as to the important 
historical contributions in the prose works of all of these. The tributes paid 
to Longfellow by his fellow-members of the Massachusetts Historical Society 
at the meeting following his death, reprinted in the present leaflet, were a 
conspicuous recognition of the historical services of the poet; and these 
tributes were impressively supplemented by those at the meeting of the 
society in February, 1907, the centennial year, also noticed above. The 
student is referred to the similar tributes by the Historical Society to Emerson, 
Lowell, and Holmes, at the meetings following their deaths, accounts of which 
will be found in the society’s Proceedings. The tributes to Longfellow by 
his fellow poets are well known, as are the various biographies, chief of which 
is that by his brother, Samuel Longfellow. The following passage from 
Edwin D. Mead’s address on “ Boston in the Boston Poets, ” at the celebration 
in December, 1906, of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the 
Bostonian Society,—printed in the Proceedings of the Society,—while relating 
primarily to the services of the poets in the local field, touches also wider 
aspects of their historical work - — 


469 



i8 


“Emerson was born in Boston, most famous of all Boston boys save only 
Franklin. Holmes and Lowell were born in Cambridge. The fathers of 
all three were Puritan ministers, pastors of historic churches: William Emer¬ 
son. of the First Church of Boston; Abiel Holmes, of the First Parish of 
Cambridge; Charles Lowell, of the West Church of Boston, over which he 
was settled just a hundred years ago this year, remaining nominally its pastor 
until his death in 1861, when his brilliant son and his fellow-singers were 
already at the zenith of their high poetic fame. 

“The three fathers were all eminent scholars and eminent citizens. 
William Emerson was the Fourth of July orator at Faneuil Hall the year 
before his great son’s birth. He wrote a History of the First Church; and 
his Monthly Anthology and Boston Review was the precursor of the North 
American Review. 

“ Charles Lowell was a man of rare culture, who to his Harvard training 
had added, a very exceptional thing in those days, a course at the University 
of Edinburgh. He was three years in Europe; and Wilberforce and Dugald 
Stewart were among his friends. He belonged to various learned societies 
in Europe as well as in America; and his devotion to historical studies was 
signal. Like William Emerson and Abiel Holmes, he was a member of the 
Massachusetts Historical Society; and for thirty years he served the society 
either as its recording or corresponding secretary—which latter office Abiel 
Holmes also filled for the twenty years immediately preceding Dr. Lowell’s 
occupancy. The present spacious West Church edifice was built to accom¬ 
modate the ‘flood-tide of would-be parishioners’ which set toward Lynde 
Street immediately after Lowell’s ordination, and he had ‘probably the 
largest congregation in Boston.’ Dr. Andrew P. Peabody, who knew him 
well, paid this high tribute to him: ‘ Dr. Lowell was, even as compared with 

Buckminster, Everett, and Channing, by far the greatest pulpit orator in 
Boston, and for prompt, continuous, uniform, and intense impression, in 
behalf of fundamental Christian truth and duty, on persons of all varieties 
of age, culture, condition, and character, I have never seen or heard his 
equal, nor can I imagine his superior.’ 

“Abiel Holmes’s contributions to history were more important than either 
Charles Lowell’s or William Emerson’s. These were both Harvard men; 
Holmes was a graduate of Yale, married the daughter of President Stiles, 
and wrote Stiles’s biography. In 1817 he delivered a course of lectures on 
ecclesiastical history, with special reference to New England; but by far the 
most important of his works—the titles of his various publications, chiefly 
sermons, fill two pages in the Historical Society’s Collections—was his 
learned ‘Annals of America,’ so rich in matter interesting to us here. 

“If, with such fathers and bred in such environment, Emerson, Holmes, 
and Lowell were not from youth to age devoted to Boston and its history, 
then there is no virtue in heredity and nurture. Emerson was a pupil of the 
Boston Latin School. Emerson, Holmes, and Lowell were all graduates of 
Harvard. Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell were Harvard professors. 
Lowell lived and died in the Cambridge home where he was born, the house 
which had been first the home of Thomas Oliver, the obnoxious royalist 
lieutenant governor, and afterwards of Elbridge Gerry. Craigie House, 
Longfellow’s home from 1836, when he entered upon his Harvard professor¬ 
ship, until his death, was on the same Tory Row, the house which had been 
built by Col. John Vassall, whose daughter Thomas Oliver married, and 
which became during the siege of Boston the headquarters of Washington. 

“Holmes, born in the ‘old gambrel-roofed house’ in Cambridge, had three 
470 


19 


Boston homes,—in Montgomery Place, now Bosworth Street, where he lived 
for eighteen years, then on the river side of Charles Street, and from 1870 
on the river side of Beacon Street. 

“Emerson, born on Summer Street, where is now the corner of Chauncy 
Street, lived afterwards on Beacon Street near the present site of the Boston 
Athenaeum, then within the limits of the present Franklin Park, and, during 
his ministry at the Second Church, in Chardon Place. 

“Whittier’s Boston lodgings, during his eight months here in 1829 as 
editor of the Manufacturer, were with Rev. William Collier, his publisher, at 
No. 30 Federal Street, where at one time Garrison was his fellow-lodger. 
While he represented Haverhill in the legislature, Robert Rantoul and he* 
had rooms together for a time at a boarding-place in Franklin Street, by the 
Bulfinch urn. 

“A signal attestation of their deep interest in our local history is afforded 
by the fact that four of our five poets—and there was equal warrant for the 
fifth—were members of the Massachusetts Historical Society; and the 
tributes paid them by their associates in the meetings following their deaths 
are illuminating and memorable as concerns this side of their activities. 
It chanced that at all these meetings the venerable George E. Ellis presided, 
at the first two in Mr. Winthrop’s absence, at the last two as president of the 
society; and his own remarks on all of these occasions were noteworthy. He 
recalled the special meeting to which Longfellow invited the society at his 
own home, as Washington’s headquarters, on June 17, 1858. ‘Few of our 
associates,’he said, ‘can have studied our local and even national.history more, 
sedulously than did Mr. Longfellow. He took the saddest of our New 
England tragedies and the sweetest of its rural home scenes, the wayside 
inn, the alarum of war, the Indian legend, and the hanging of the crane in 
the modest household, and his genius has invested them with enduring 
charms and morals. He has, indeed, used freely the poet’s license in playful 
freedom with dates and facts. But the scenes and incidents and personages 
which most need a softening and refining touch receive it from him without 
prejudice to the service to sober history.’ He recalled at the Emerson 
memorial meeting the impressive scene when, fifteen months before, Emerson, 
appearing there for the last time, had read his tribute to Carlyle. Of Holmes 
he remembered that his last presence with the society was when he read his 
noble tribute to Francis Parkman. Holmes himself was one of the speakers 
at both the Longfellow and Emerson meetings, and his words on both occa¬ 
sions were the most important which were uttered. Lowell was appointed 
by the society to prepare the memoir of Longfellow, and accepted the task, 
but was compelled by pressing new duties to surrender it to other hands. 
Of Lowell himself Charles Francis Adams said at the meeting following 
his death, ‘No one among us all had such a nice and subtle appreciation as 
he of the lights and shadows of New England life, or the varied phases of 
New England character.’ 

“Our five Boston poets have not only painted each other’s portraits for 
us, but there are few Boston men who have achieved things worth achieving 
in the last two generations whose spiritual lineaments are not perpetuated 
in their pages. Channing, Webster, Everett, Sumner, Hawthorne, Motley, 
Agassiz, Garrison, Phillips, Andrew,—these are but the most illustrious of 
the illustrious company commemorated in verses dear not alone to the 
Bostonian, but to every American. 


471 


“To the student of the history of art there are few rooms in the Uffizi 
Gallery more impressive than those whose walls are hung with the rich 
collection of portraits of the world’s great painters, painted by themselves. 
To the student of English history there are few places in London more 
illuminating than the National Portrait Gallery. We are debtors to our 
Boston poets for creating for us a Boston Portrait Gallery, in which their 
own characters and purposes and those of their renowned contemporaries 
in the Boston of the nineteenth century are depicted in the sharpest, truest, 
and most imperishable lines. Through our poets the actors in our history 
are given an immortal vitality, and every pregnant epoch and incident in our 
history from the beginning is glorified. 

“Our poets not only chronicled and transfigured our history: they all 
in their time helped greatly to make our history, and that precisely in those 
lines of it which are, in Emerson’s words, ‘inextricably national, part of the 
history of liberty.’ They wove themselves into our history in the momen¬ 
tous period in which their lives were cast, and their burning verses are a 
cardinal part of the authentic record. I like to say that, if we could rear 
in Boston two monuments upon which, about the central figures of Samuel 
Adams and William Lloyd Garrison, should be grouped the Boston leaders 
in the struggles which gave America her independence and freed her from 
slavery, we should have there commemorated an imposing portion of what 
was most dynamic in those two chief chapters of our national history. In 
the illustrious anti-slavery group, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, and 
Lowell would all have place.” 


PUBLISHED BY 

THE DIRECTORS OF THE OLD SOUTH WORK, 
Old South Meeting-house, Boston, Mass. 


472 



